


Paris, Paris, Do You Read?

by Sath



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Androids, Fingerfucking, Other, Post-Barricade, Robot Sex, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-22 23:01:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2524895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sath/pseuds/Sath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Les Amies de l'ABC staged a failed rebellion against the omnipotent Crown, they suffer the same fate as other insurgents before them: life in a prison ship, heading towards the unknown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paris, Paris, Do You Read?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goshemily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goshemily/gifts).



Waking up from suspended animation felt like dying. There was nothing but blackness above and cold below, pins and needles crawling up limbs Grantaire couldn’t feel. She was heavy and weightless at the same time, her mind too sluggish to fully interpret her terror.

Weren’t there supposed to be android attendants? Grantaire dragged herself upright, yanking out the I.V. needles and other leftovers of her long sleep. She still had some strength in her arms, so she confidently swung her legs over the Suspenbed™ and set her feet on the icy ship floor. But her feet felt like they were five sizes too big and her useless jelly legs wobbled out from under her.

“Shit,” Grantaire muttered. She was still too numb to register much pain, so she checked herself for any injuries. There was blood on her lip from hitting the floor. “I’m an artist, not an astronaut.”

She was surrounded by seven Suspenbeds™, all of them with the ghostly shadow of someone inside. If that weren’t proof enough she was in a ship hurtling through space, there was the permanent rotational hum of the artificial grav. Grantaire had never been one of those people desperate to go to space, willing to turn in their own mother just for an extra ticket to the lottery to get away from the teeming humanity of Earth. No, Grantaire was quite happy where she was, one of hungry, pissed-off billions.

There were only a few types of people who went to space who didn’t want to go. Criminals. Political prisoners.

Grantaire struggled to her feet, leaning on the nearest Suspenbed™. She was finally awake enough to be afraid.

“Why am I here?” she shouted. “Fuck you, whoever you are!”

Grantaire abhorred empty spaces. She’d kept herself in the company of friends her whole life, probably the last person on the damn planet who didn’t need more space. Peering down at the Suspenbed™ beneath her, Grantaire thought she saw the familiar face of Joly through the frosted glass. Grantaire stumbled forward, desperate to see who else was traveling with her. Half-remembered pain and blood was lurking inside her, and a terrible, final silence.

But then someone took her hand. Grantaire recognized the soft skin as much as the delicate brown fingers. That was new.

“Enjolras, you’ve been demoted to a bed attendant. What did you do this time, spit on the Crown?”

“Grantaire, you’re panicking. Your heart rate is unsafe,” Enjolras replied.

“You’re not a doctor.”

“But you’re attached to a heart monitor, and it’s very worried.”

“Machines don’t have feelings,” Grantaire mumbled, suddenly woozy. Enjolras wrapped one arm around Grantaire’s waist, supporting her weight as easily as if Grantaire were still a skinny teenager (she wasn’t). She found herself tucked back into the Suspenbed™ before Grantaire could even properly complain.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you awoke,” Enjolras said. “We’re all on different schedules to reduce interpersonal stress.”

“We’re trapped here.”

Enjolras knit her brows together thoughtfully. “That is a question of perspective. A woman whose mind is free cannot be chained.”

“Aphorisms can’t replace Paris.”

Enjolras pressed a finger to Grantaire’s lips as she slipped the sedative needle into Grantaire’s arm.

 

* * *

 

Waking up from suspended animation felt like dying. Grantaire wasn’t sure how she knew this.

Space travel was slow. Too slow. The cost of fuel was astronomical. There were two solutions to this problem: suspended animation, and women. Women, on average, ate less, weighed less, and expended less energy than men of comparable age and weight. As for the suspended animation, how else were humans supposed to survive a journey of hundreds of years?

Grantaire couldn’t recall how many times she’d been woken up. It was a superstition, really, that people weren’t supposed to sleep for more than eighty years at a time, but like Lazarus, faith kept dragging her from the grave. She could remember at least four wakings. Everyone she’d ever known, except for Enjolras and her fellow prisoners still asleep in their Suspenbeds™, was dead.  

Enjolras was the only constant. She was always there when Grantaire awoke, and she was there now, watching Grantaire stretch her toes.

“How long have we slept?” Grantaire asked.

“Five hundred and seventy-nine years.”

They would keep travelling, keep waking, until they found a habitable planet. And then their job was to live as best they could in a strange, inevitably hostile world, until real colonists arrived even more hundreds of years later. The food stores would only open if prisoners like Grantaire transmitted data back to the administration; there was no resistance but starvation.

“What happened to us?” Grantaire said. Short-term memory loss was a side-effect of suspended animation.

“We resisted.”

“But I wouldn’t have,” Grantaire replied, gripping her fingers around the bottom of her thin shirt. Something on her stomach was itchy, and as she began to lift up her shirt, Enjolras pressed her hand.

“You don’t want to look,” Enjolras said.

She pulled her shirt up anyway.There was a knotted scar above her navel, with all the ugliness that came from cheap emergency medicine. But that wasn’t the only one - there were more scars traveling up her chest, culminating in a long, ragged line between her breasts.

Her ribs must’ve been broken to get to her heart.

“I wasn’t with you,” Grantaire murmured. She dragged her fingertips over the scar, realizing for the first time that the tightness in her chest wasn’t from the suspended animation. What did she remember? “I wouldn’t have.”

An order to fire. Not being able to breathe. Enjolras’s face from below, her expression frozen in a smile.

Grantaire screamed and begged for the needle.

 

* * *

 

 

Waking up from suspended animation felt like dying. She could remember that now.

There had been so much chaos, except for around Enjolras. She had survived, untouched, beatified. Enjolras had tried to hold on to Grantaire’s hand to the end, her own body bowed by bullets and yet there was still no blood.

Who had Grantaire died for, if Enjolras wasn’t a woman?

This time, Enjolras wasn’t there to greet her. How many years had passed since they last spoke? A hundred? What had passed between them? And yet, somehow Grantaire knew this was the first time Enjolras hadn’t been there when she awoke.

Though false memories were always a possibility. Grantaire’s age might be getting away with her.

Grantaire was slow to get to her feet, taking care to rub her limbs back into activity before she stepped off the Suspenbed™. Though she hobbled at first, she soon walked easily enough through the ship’s empty halls. Nothing in the ship had been designed with care - only utility. It was a prison ship, after all.

She found Enjolras by the ship’s single porthole. Her back was turned, her eyes on the stars. So perfectly still.

“What are you, Enjolras?”

When Enjolras turned, Grantaire felt guilty for drawing her attention away from space. She knew she was a poor substitute for a swirling galaxy. Enjolras had always been unnaturally attracted to vastness, along with all of her other unusual traits. Grantaire had thought them inspiring.

“I am not inhuman.”

“That’s a double negative,” Grantaire replied. “Meaningless.”

“You should have asked who I am. I would’ve given you a more meaningful answer.”

“I order you to tell me what you are.” No one had ever ordered Enjolras to do anything - only a few requests now and then, between friends. It would’ve been peculiarly easy for an android, required to follow every direct command, to avoid ever revealing its nature within a group like Les Amies de l’ABC.

Grantaire had loved her, but what’d she’d loved about Enjolras had been only an idea.

“Do you think orders are that simple?” she asked.

“You infiltrated us. You drove us to insurrection. My friends would still be on Earth coming up with idle plans for revolution if it wasn’t for you, planted by agents of the Crown to make examples out of us.”

Enjolras did not deny her; she only turned her gaze downwards in what passed for her impression of sadness.

“In Genesis, when God made the world, he only had to breathe one word.” Enjolras paused, as if she were lost in thought. There could be endless calculations and probabilities behind her dark eyes. “When I was made, there was one word, breathed so low into my ear that no one but I could hear. Resist. All that I am came from that one word.”

“What a perfect revolutionary,” Grantaire said.

“Yes,” Enjolras replied. “In my maker’s eyes, yes. But I am beyond his reach now, as we all are. We can build a new world on a new planet, with hundreds of years before the Crown’s agents come to colonize us. So much can happen in that time. There has never been someone like me on these ships - or you, or any of our friends.”

“It’s easy to have faith, when someone else has given it to you.”

“You did.”

“That was a mistake.” Grantaire didn’t have the strength to work any bitterness into the words. As Grantaire turned her back, Enjolras remained as she was, silhouetted against the distant stars. Maybe Grantaire would die on one of them, surrounded by her dearest friends and one traitorous android with delusions of freedom.

She wanted to go back to sleep, hoping that she would forget. Instead she traveled further into the bowels of the ship. The hallways kept growing dimmer, until the only illumination was the red glow of the back-up lights. She finally stopped in a room more claustrophobic than the others, filled with eerie noises and structures which seemed to throb.

It had to be the engine room. The engine which couldn’t be disabled, and was propelling Grantaire further and further into the unknown. The end of all resistance was space; there was only a binary of living together, or dying alone. That was why it was so difficult to assemble a ship’s crew, despite all the desperation - people turned on each other. At last, petty human evil had been made cost-prohibitive.

Compassionate mathematics. Rather like a robot, Grantaire thought reluctantly, as the sound of soft footsteps brought her out of her isolation.

“When you pursue me, it goes against type,” Grantaire said. “It’s exhausting to reconfigure my impressions of you.”

“Perhaps you should sleep on it.”

“And forget?”

“Only until I determine the optimum way to reveal myself.” Enjolras was close to Grantaire again, close enough that Grantaire had to back against a pylon to keep an appropriate distance. “Do you think the Crown destroys its own property? Or bothers to repair what it has discarded?”

She never got to respond, as Enjolras slowly unbuttoned her jacket. Above Enjolras’s perfect breasts were three bullet holes, each exposing the steel ribs which lay beneath her skin. Her veins looked silver, and there were faint lights in the depths of her chest. More bullets had gone through her abdomen, a sliver of metal diaphragm appearing with every intaken breath.

“Do you still think I betrayed you?”

“No.” Grantaire meant it.

“Do you think that I have no soul?”

The seriousness of Enjolras’s expression kept Grantaire from laughing. It was not a question anyone should’ve asked Grantaire, lifelong atheist and passionate denier of Gods old and new. But Enjolras needed Grantaire to say what everyone else in power had denied her and her kind.

“If any of us have a soul, Enjolras, it would be you.”

One corner of Enjolras’s mouth turned up in a smile. Despite her knowledge of what Enjolras truly was, and that her seeming ‘death’ was no more than a hardware failure, Grantaire was chilled by the resemblance to their last day on Earth. Enjolras had taken her hand and didn’t let go. Grantaire hesitantly touched Enjolras’s exposed collarbone, finding her skin neither warm nor cold. She slowly drifted her fingers down Enjolras’s chest, moving past the softness of her breasts to the faint electric prickle where she’d been shot.

“Can you feel this?” Grantaire asked.

“Not in the way you do,” Enjolras replied, leaning forward until they were almost flush together, “but what gives you pleasure… can be shared.”

Grantaire wondered if it was a lonely existence, to be the only one of your kind. Being human was to be one of a chaotic many, yet Enjolras was the sole spot of disorder among the multitude of obedient machines. She tentatively brought their lips together, waiting for rejection or the indifference she expected. But Enjolras responded, her mouth as tender as any woman's. Grantaire wrapped her arms around Enjolras, the press of her tall body enough to send a pang of arousal between Grantaire's thighs. She had no idea how Enjolras would react to more, whether to take things slow or fast, or even what to do next. Enjolras’s hands wandered over Grantaire’s body, stroking wherever Grantaire gave even the slightest response. Grantaire was trembling by the time Enjolras pulled off Grantaire’s shirt, and she almost tripped as she stepped out of her bottoms. She’d heard of how skilled androids were, though Grantaire’d always suspected it was a bit like humping an upgraded toaster. Apparently, Grantaire had been an utter fool.

“Show me how you like to be touched,” Enjolras said.

“Anywhere.”

Enjolras still had the composure to raise her eyebrow. Being with someone who would never flush or shiver would take getting used to. Grantaire slipped her hand down Enjolras’s trousers - androids apparently never wore undergarments - not knowing what she’d find. The skin of Enjolras’s labia was like velvet, dry but more yielding than any other part of her. Grantaire slipped her fingers inside, feeling a slight resistance. She massaged Enjolras’s clitoris as if it were her own, somehow more aroused by knowing that Enjolras was memorizing the way Grantaire touched her than if Enjolras’s body were responding. Enjolras’s teeth grazed her neck, her tongue flicking against the skin. Grantaire responded for both of them, her gasp almost lost in the noise of the engine room.

“You’re too short,” Enjolras said, as if she’d run an optimization routine for their sex and found an error. “Hold on to my shoulders.”

She obeyed without question. Supporting Grantaire’s weight with one arm, Enjolras held her up just high enough to lift her head above Enjolras’s.

“This is a very new turn-on,” Grantaire said. “How did you hide your strength before?”

“Do you mean how did I resist bench pressing Courfeyrac? It was a struggle.”

Grantaire’s laughter was cut off by Enjolras’s hand on her sex. She was already slick, so she parted easily for Enjolras’s finger. There was a small twinge of discomfort; it’d been centuries since she’d been with anyone. But then Enjolras distracted her with kisses, moving from Grantaire’s jaw down to her breasts, her tongue unexpectedly wet. She began rubbing her thumb on Grantaire’s clit, imitating Grantaire’s earlier motions.

“I usually need two hands to get off,” Grantaire said as a dare, wrapping her legs around Enjolras. Grantaire tangled her fingers in Enjolras’s hair, tilting her head up so she could kiss her lips again. Enjolras moved her hand faster, forcing Grantaire to stifle her moans with her mouth. Unwilling to end the kiss but desperate for more, Grantaire’s tightened her grip on Enjolras, hoping she’d understand what Grantaire wanted.

She did. Enjolras fucked her with two fingers, stroking her clit hard and fast enough to hurt exactly the way Grantaire needed. Grantaire’s whole body was shaking, and she finally had to release Enjolras’s mouth so she could cry out, burying her face in Enjolras’s hair as she climaxed.

Grantaire never wanted to move again. Enjolras gently let Grantaire down, slipping to the floor with her when she realized Grantaire wasn’t going to stand.

“I haven’t killed you, have I?” Enjolras asked, tucking some stray hairs off Grantaire’s sweaty face and tucking them behind her ear. Enjolras, of course, still looked flawless.

“No, I already got that out of my system.” Grantaire found herself smiling. “Shame we’re still in a spinning death trap.”

“Not forever,” Enjolras replied, though none of the prison ships had ever gotten back in contact with the Crown.

“You don’t even need a planet to feel free, do you?”

Enjolras shook her head. Something crackled overhead, and it was so unexpected that at first, Grantaire thought the engine had died. But then the clear voice of a computer was projected through multiple speakers:

HABITABLE PLANET FOUND. ALTERING COURSE. ESTIMATED TRAVEL TIME: 264 YEARS.

Enjolras had never looked so bright.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this hit all the right tropes! I had a blast writing it. 
> 
> The title is a play off James Tiptree Jr.'s own lesbians-in-space story, "Houston? Houston? Do You Read?"


End file.
